The present invention relates generally to wireless communications and more particularly to a method and system for customizable flow management in a cellular basestation.
Mobile virtual network operators MVNOs are emerging as strong players in the mobile network market to provide enhanced services such as video telephony, live streaming and interactive games (along with traditional voice services) to focused customers. This model is argued to be a win-win situation for both MVNOs and mobile network operators MNOs, since MVNOs help MNOs attract and retain a greater number of customers. For MNOs and MVNOs, customizability fosters greater innovation in flow management and other services to achieve differentiation from their competitors (100 and 102). For controlled evaluation of innovations (101), greater customizability would enable deploying and testing new solutions without recompiling or rebooting the basestations. In addition, most basestation manufacturers restrict access to the basestations they provide to the MNOs. Customization would provide MNOs with more access to the flow management with little modification to the basestation. The MNOs can pass this functionality to the different MVNOs it hosts.
As revenue from voice services is decreasing rapidly, data services are receiving increased focus from WiMAX, 3G and LTE network operators. Already, more sophisticated data plans for revenue generation on 3G networks have emerged, and are constantly evolving. Many of these sophisticated data plans include corporate bundle plans where the bandwidth is shared across a group of employees of a corporation. The management policies of flows/group of flows for a corporation or an enterprise have unique requirements. A network with customized flow management would be an ideal fit for enterprises offering wireless services to its employees. Further corporate intranets can be made accessible to users “everywhere” through complete virtualization of the network resources (101).
The goal of the global environment for network innovations GENI is to enable a general virtualized environment for supporting experimentation and prototype deployments for studying innovative technologies in large-scale real life scenarios (101). This has not been possible in the past since mobile network operator MNO equipment has been closed for experimentation. Customization can help MNOs to provide a way to deploy and test innovative ideas, while running operational networks. This provides a win-win situation for both network providers and researchers.
Currently, there are no teachings on providing customizability on cellular wireless basestations over technologies such as WiMAX and LTE. Many researchers rely on simulations to evaluate new scheduling processes, but simulations are ineffective in modeling the different real-world scenarios. Moreover, no prior scheduling discipline allowed execution of customized flow management by an outside entity on a wireless basestation. MNOs and MVNOs have relied on the efficiency of the flow management implemented in the basestations by the basestation equipment manufacturers.
Accordingly, there is a need for customizable and adaptive flow-management that provides an interface for flow management in cellular basestations such as WiMAX and LTE.